Applied AI Engineer - Conversational AI

Founding Applied AI Engineer (Stealth AI Startup) We're partnering with a well-funded AI startup founded by former enterprise software leaders to hire a Founding Applied AI Engineer . The company is building an AI-native platform that is reimagining how knowledge workers interact with enterprise systems, replacing traditional workflows with intelligent, conversational AI. Backed by leading Silicon Valley investors, the company is currently in stealth and is preparing to raise its Series A following the completion of a small number of key founding hires. Design partners are already in place, with the first product launching in early 2027. The Opportunity This is a rare chance to join as one of the first technical hires and help define the company's AI platform from the ground up. You'll work directly with the founders to design, build and ship production AI systems that will become the foundation of the product. This is a deeply hands-on engineering role where you'll own problems end-to-end—from research and prototyping through to production deployment. What You'll Be Working On Building production-grade AI agents capable of reasoning and taking actions across complex enterprise workflows Designing retrieval, search and knowledge systems that power intelligent user experiences Developing evaluation frameworks to improve model quality, reliability and agent performance Building orchestration systems for multi-agent workflows and tool use Improving LLM performance through prompt engineering, fine-tuning and post-training techniques where appropriate Working closely with customers and design partners to rapidly iterate on product capabilities Helping establish the technical foundations of the AI platform as the engineering team scales We're Looking For Strong production experience building modern AI/ML systems Hands-on experience with one or more of: LLMs and agentic AI Search, retrieval or recommendation systems RAG and knowledge systems Ranking, personalization or large-scale ML LLM evaluation, post-training or model optimization Strong software engineering fundamentals with experience shipping production systems Comfortable operating in ambiguity and excited by zero-to-one product development Motivated by ownership, speed and building alongside founders Why Join? Founding engineer opportunity with significant technical ownership Work directly alongside an exceptional founding team with deep enterprise software experience Backed by top-tier venture investors with Series A planned for later this year Small, high-calibre engineering team where every hire will shape the product and technical direction Competitive compensation alongside meaningful early-stage equity Opportunity to build an AI-native product from inception through rapid company growth This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy building from first principles, shipping quickly, and solving difficult applied AI problems rather than simply integrating existing models. Show more Show less